Nature Against Nature: Emerson’s First Book and the Diminishing of Animal Lives

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, published in 1836, became one of the founding documents of American environmentalism, its veneration of the natural world a reformulation of the intimidating wilderness previously haunting the minds of those in the young nation. His work, however, framed nature as serving human ends; a response to a specific time and place, nineteenth-century New England, Nature either ignored or diminished the lives of the nonhuman animals who inhabited those spaces. The influence of Emerson’s framing on the environmental movement would contribute to its concern for animals at a species rather than individual level, creating a divide between environmental and animal activists in the generations that followed, one that is still present in the movements today. Using a critical animal studies lens, this article examines the role of animals in Emerson’s Nature to help explain the nineteenth-century causes of that divide.